As Classy As 123

New Building Enhances Acker-franklin Strip

The new 123 N. Wacker Dr. building is a distinguished addition to what has become one of Chicago`s most important architectural showcases, the Wacker-Franklin corridor.

Ralph Johnson of Perkins & Will designed 123 Wacker for Rubloff, Inc., which wanted an office building good enough to quickly attract a prime tenant seeking quarters with class. Johnson`s 30-story exercise in lively good taste satisfied that need and has taken its place among the better new small office towers to come out of the current downtown building boom.

The look of 123 Wacker is partly derivative of its environs, and that underscores the importance of the corridor.

Only a few notable buildings were located on North and South Wacker Drive before World War II. They included the historic Lind Block at 150 N. Wacker, which survived the Chicago fire but was torn down in 1963, and the Troescher Building, a Louis Sullivan structure at 1 S. Wacker demolished a few years ago. The mighty Civic Opera House, extant at Wacker and Madison, was built in 1929.

Short of cataloguing all of the newer postwar buildings on the Wacker strip, it is enough to say that they include a strong range of work by such mature masters as Bruce Graham and Harry Weese and such still rising younger architects as William Pedersen and Helmut Jahn (now joined by Ralph Johnson, who is 38).

And then there is Franklin Street, one block east of Wacker and running parallel with it. The thoroughfare once offered practically no buildings of interest, but with Wacker it now comprises an important north-south corridor between the Chicago River and Van Buren Street. Planned or under construction along Franklin are several promising buildings by such other ascendant architects as Adrian Smith and Joseph Gonzalez.It is a renaissance street in the making.

The whole of this rich architectural swath was surveyed by Johnson when he came up with initial design ideas for 123 Wacker. He finally opted for an approach that would reflect the mixed architectural characteristics of the entire corridor.

This embraced everything from the elephantiasic modernism of Sears Tower to the solidly stone-clad buildings of earlier times.

So diverse was the corridor that Johnson could not be contextual in any pure sense. Yet he devised a personal combination of these stylistic languages --a kind of architectural Esperanto.

Johnson next decided on a tripartite vertical organization of the building, the same classically-rooted, base-shaft-top arrangement favored by Sullivan and other early Chicago designers of tall The pyramid top of the new 123 Wacker Dr. building is constructed of horizontally mounted, closely spaced pipes that allow light to pass through from the inside.